As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Components of information handling systems are often connected with data busses, such as Peripheral component Interconnection (PCI), PCI Express (PCIe), etc. A common data bus configuration includes sets of wire conductors arranged as differential pairs, each pair being commonly referred to as a “lane.” Lanes can be degraded during an initial training or setup sequence of operations, or during operation of the information handling system. Lane degradation can occur as a result of errors in the training process, bent connector pins or damaged connector contacts, shorts in the wire conductors, or the like.
In prior systems, a data bus may still be able to operate in a reduced width mode, where all conductors up to the degraded lane are used, but all lanes after the degraded lane are unused. In such systems, several of the unused lanes may be individually operable, but are unused because the bus controller is unable to utilize the unused lanes. Therefore, prior systems wasted potentially usable bandwidth on a data bus with one or more degraded lanes.